How to Craft an Outstanding Email

Rev up your email marketing performance with these seven tips

So you’re running an email campaign. Good for you! You’ve developed a campaign plan and segmented your list, now it’s time to craft the actual emails. You send emails every day, you’ve been practicing for this since you got your first AOL account, it should be a cinch right? Well, crafting marketing emails doesn’t have to be hard, but you should put some strategy behind it. That said, following these seven tips can help you craft an outstanding email.

Consider Your Audience

First and foremost, you need to consider your audience. You don’t want to send customers the same email you send prospects or send managers the same email you send C-level executives. Who you’re targeting should play a critical role in what you say and how you say it.

Write a Quality Message

As with anything you do, the message of your email needs to be clear, concise and well written. Make sure your brand’s voice and personality come through and that the message is valuable and relevant to your target reader. Additionally, confirm that you’ve appropriately tailored your message to the channel — while we typically expect more than a 140 character Tweet in an email, no one wants to sit and read an entire blog post in an email either.

Think Big Picture

There’s more to an email than just the body message. Yes, that’s important, and the meat of what you’re sharing, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Think of it like baseball: A great pitcher can get you a long way, but he’s nothing without the rest of the team in the field. With that in mind, you also need to consider everything from your subject line and sender to the look and feel of your email and what time you will send it.

Make the Call to Action Clear

What’s your ultimate goal? Do you want your prospects to download something, register for an event, reply to the email? Whatever it is, make sure this call to action (CTA) is very clear. To do so, you should limit the number of CTAs (ideally to one), make sure your CTA is relevant to the rest of the email and ensure that you don’t bury the CTA (both visually and textually).

Accommodate Mobile

Unless you’re living under a rock, you know mobile is big. But you might not realize just how important it is. According to Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s 2015 State of Marketing report, 33% of marketers state that their emails are read on mobile devices at least 50% of the time (and that number is up 37.5% from 2014), with 15% saying that their emails are read on mobile at least 70% of the time. So what does all of this mean for you as you craft your emails? First, think about how your emails will appear for mobile users. Ideally, you should build a responsive design to accommodate users on devices of all types and sizes (the Salesforce report also indicates that responsive design can lead to a 130% increase in email clicks). Second, think about how you might need to tailor your message to a smaller screen — short is always sweet when it comes to email marketing, and this is especially the case if you’re reading emails on your phone.

Make it Worthwhile

What will someone get by opening and reading your email? You need to make sure that your email provides value to readers in some way (e.g. educating them on something they care about, providing them with pertinent information, giving them something, inviting them somewhere), otherwise they’ll be less inclined to open any future emails.

Track and Learn

Every business and its customers are different: Find out what works well for you and repeat it. The biggest mistake you can make when it comes to email marketing (or any type of campaign for that matter) is going in blind. Track your efforts and learn from them. The numbers don’t lie: Capturing key metrics like open rate, click through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate and inbox placement rate can tell you what’s working and what’s not.